Service employees’ concurrent adaptive and unethical behaviors in complex or non-routine tasks: The effects of customer control and self-monitoring personality

We investigate how uncertainty-ridden task environments simultaneously trigger both positive and negative coping behaviors among front-line service employees. We suggest that complex and non-routine tasks give rise to employees’ exercise of both creative discretion such as adaptive selling and deviant discretion such as unethical selling behavior. Moreover, customer control moderates these relations by constraining employees’ adaptive selling...